


Offerings to the Patron Saint of Lost Girls

by story_monger



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode: s10e20 Angel Heart, Gen, post-ep
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-30
Updated: 2015-04-30
Packaged: 2018-03-26 10:43:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3847948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/story_monger/pseuds/story_monger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean sees quicksilver mirrors of Jo plenty. Flashing through Claire’s rolled eyes and Alex’s posturing. The way Charlie grins and how Krissy swaggers and the tone in which Kate explained she was ready to protect others from herself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Offerings to the Patron Saint of Lost Girls

When they make time to visit Jody’s place and Claire comes barreling into the living room, Dean catches Sam’s expression. At that moment Dean knows: Sam’s thought it too. Not a long leap, is it? Blurs of yellow hair that only come up shoulder height, guns slipping through small, fierce fingers like they’re designed for it, a fuck you attitude from here to heaven and hell.

Right on Claire’s heels comes Alex, looking browner than the last time Dean saw her. The way their shoulders crash every so often, the way they keep low balling catchphrases to each other in some steady, unspoken rhythm, that settles well with Dean, and it seems only expected. It explains why Claire is still with Jody after so many months.

Jody herds them into the kitchen and parks sweating bottles of beers in front of Dean and Sam, tells the girls that they’re not going to drink on a school night. They both make faces, and Dean catches that expression again around Sam’s eyes. Dean takes a pull of his beer and imagines that this is some reverberation of souls that’s bounced back to them in constructive waves. A shout originating in years long past and now an echo come to ripple around them.

Dean sees these quicksilver mirrors of Jo plenty. Flashing through Claire’s rolled eyes and Alex’s posturing. The way Charlie grins and how Krissy swaggers and the tone in which Kate explained she was ready to protect others from herself. Dean’s always had a bad habit of collecting family, and he realizes now that he’s quietly pledged himself to sisters and daughters and cousins scattered across the country where he can’t see them. It makes his heart seize.

Across the table, Jody is recounting a hunt from a few months back, from when she and Donna took out a djinn. Sam acts the ideal audience, as Alex and Claire have already heard all this and now opt to jump in at bad times with extraneous details. Jody bats them down, heavy but with claws withdrawn. It is familiar in a way that stabs, and Dean all but expects to look around and find the Roadhouse, ghostly but intact again. He imagines that he smells a whiff of cigarette smoke, a ground-in layer of salt and gunpowder.

Maybe he’s projecting his own tired, scar-tissue guilt, but who knows? Dean’s willing to bet that Jo’s been figuring out all sort of tricks up in heaven, especially with Ash around. Who’s to say she’s not flicking at the Winchesters through a series of narrowed blue eyes, whirling red hair, leaping snarls, high laughter?

 _Patron saint huntress of the lost girls,_ Dean imagines _. You still feel guilty for that shit? Then lay down offerings of mercy and good words and your most valuable lessons to these charges. Then I won’t have to kick your and your brother’s asses when I see you the next time._

It makes Dean laugh around his beer bottle, and no one questions him because the kitchen is warm and still smells like crock pot chicken, the night is mild and sans monsters for now, and the company is safe and it is good.

 


End file.
